I can across Alexander Perrin’sShort Trip through a retweeted twitter post, aimlessly clicking on links. I certainly wasn’t expecting what i got, which was a beautifully simple and elegant interactive web animation. I was working, eating and browsing twitter at the same time (doing neither of them very well) and heard Perrin’s work first. The audio by Dom Willmott is gentle and calming, it’s what first brought my attention back to the screen.

Illustration Meets Animation

What your presented with at first looks like just a simple idyllic graphite illustration of a few small building nestled into the trees. That illustrative quality is exactly what Perrin is looking to play with. But the presence of the sound gives you the sense that your not just looking at a static image. It takes a few moments before I see our character and start stabbing at keys on the keyboard for a hint of animation. Using the forward and backward keys our character starts to move. What results is a train journey through a fantastical mountain side, stoping along the way to pick up and drop off other passengers. The animation is simple and so is the interaction, but the layered illustrations when paired with the audio is captivating. I kept pushing the character forward wondering where it would end.

It’s a nice example of seemingly small choices and simple interactions that create a really engaging experiences.

Short Trip is the first instalment in a collection of interactive illustrations created for the web. It has been created as a study into capturing the essence of graphite on paper within a digital context, and to learn more about web-based graphics technologies.

‘The Outlands’ is a virtual reality environment that allows the viewer to explore a series of imaginary landscapes using customized control sticks. Built with the Unreal game engine the work has four levels where viewers are free to take their time to look around and explore without fear of assassination.

Visitors are invited to take control and conduct their own voyage through an immersive digital world of forests, islands, and futuristic interior architecture. Clasping the tree branches that sit atop a console table, the viewer navigates through each zone, encountering portals into the other worlds configured within the work. While appearing to be a video game, what are startlingly absent are weapons, bodies and aggression. The logic of killing and winning that structures gaming no longer exists, and is replaced with the process of moving through each digital environment and at times suddenly being transported into an adjacent world. Exploratory voyaging becomes the subject of ‘The outlands’ and a close attention to the digital environments portrayed within it.

‘The landscape of Jølster; that smell and mouldy dampness of old heathendom and primitive religion, that earth rich in sagas; these often raw colours have more importance than as mere subjects for my pictures. And this in my opinion is what motifs should be to all painters, that they in other words should be closer bound to the earth…’ – Nikolai Astrup

Astrup sought a national “visual language” that evoked the traditions and folklore of his homeland. Best known for his luminous paintings of Midsummer Eve bonfires, Astrup’s landscapes evoke the atmosphere and changing seasons of his home district of Jølster. Places important to Astrup – the old parsonage where he grew up, his beautiful farmstead at Sandalstrand (named “Astruptunet” after him), and the lake Jølstravatnet were to become the focus and inspiration of a unique and extraordinary body of work.

https://vimeo.com/154316922

Video can’t be loaded: Forest Folk (https://vimeo.com/154316922)

“Enter the mausoleum slowly and try not to wake up the mythical creatures. If they detect your presence, they will react to your movements and transform.”

Nexus Interactive Arts was commissioned to produce an original installation for Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Entitled “Forest Folk”, the responsive installation is an extension of the ‘Nikolai Astrup: Painting Norway’ Exhibit – one of Norway’s finest twentieth-century landscape artists.

A characteristic trait of Astrup’s work was to project his childhood memories onto the landscape of his hometown, allowing his childlike imagination to permeate his work. The concept of transformation is a key element: from shape-shifters to trolls to other Norwegian mythological creatures, any part of his paintings can come alive, especially if you know to look out for these surprises.

NIA had carte blanche to create a complementary piece, drawing on Astrup’s central themes of transformation and mythology, and to immerse Gallery audiences into a world of magical landscapes where reality and the surreal blend together in unexpected moments. Visitors are invited to enter the gallery’s private Mausoleum slowly, and try not to wake up the mythical creatures camouflaged within two impressive digital 4k screens set up as a diptych. Through the combination of custom software and motion sensor cameras, the artwork can detect visitor’s presence and awaken from their idle state to morph into a living and breathing entity. A hauntingly low melody set to diegetic sounds of the forest further envelops audiences, while taking them through a cycle of the four seasons represented in the artwork.

Every element in the composition was shot in live-action against a green screen, then composited in post-production to form the overall image. Director Matt Jakob creates a pictorial quality that allows the artwork to embody Astrup’s style, whilst remaining interactive and modern at its core.

Automultiscopic 3D displays allow a large number of viewers to experience 3D content simultaneously without the hassle of special glasses or head gear. This display uses a dense array of 216 video projectors to generate images with high angular density over a wide field of view. As users move around the display, their eyes smoothly transition from one view to the next. The display is ideal for displaying life-size human subjects, as it allows for natural personal interactions with 3D cues such as eye-gaze and spatial hand gestures.

The installation presents “time-offset” interactions with recorded 3D human subjects. A large set of video statements was recorded for each subject, and users access these statements through natural conversation that mimics face-to-face interaction. Conversational reactions to user questions are retrieved through speech recognition and a statistical classifier that finds the best video response for a given question. Recordings of answers, listening, and idle behaviors are linked together to create a persistent visual image of the person throughout the interaction. This type of time-offset interaction can support a wide range of applications, from creating entertaining performances to recording historical figures for education.

A map of Manhattan composed of hand-drawn maps by various New York pedestrians whom the artist asked for directions.

Pretending to be a tourist by wearing a souvenir cap and carrying a shopping bag of Century 21, a major tourist shopping place, I ask various New York pedestrians to draw a map to direct me to another location. I connect and place these small maps based on actual geography in order to make Them function as parts of A Larger map.